The range of features to be found in Saturn's C ring is seen in this
Cassini image.
Near the bottom of the frame is a narrow eccentric ringlet lying in a gap
that researchers suspect may contain one or more very small moons. Farther
up, the bright feature is one of the C ring's "plateaus." These bright
features in the C ring are much denser than the surrounding material, and
their origin is also being studied.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on Nov. 9, 2008 at a distance of approximately 339,000
kilometers (211,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or
phase, angle of 101 degrees. Image scale is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per
pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
